Pinball's plunger first appeared on a European game misnamed Japanese billiards
The spring-loaded plunger that launches a pinball has a long pedigree. It first appeared on a bagatelle game called Japanese billiards in the mid-to-late 1700s, replacing the cue, and that same table game is also an ancestor of pachinko. The name was a misnomer; it was invented in Western Europe.
Pinball's roots lie in outdoor games of rolling balls or stones across grass, such as bocce and bowls. These led to ground billiards, played by striking balls with sticks toward targets around obstacles, from which croquet, golf and pall-mall eventually emerged. Indoor versions followed, on tables as with billiards or on pub floors as with bowling and shuffleboard, and the tabletop forms became pinball's ancestors.
During Louis XIV's reign, from 1643 to 1715, French billiard tables were made narrower, with skittles at one end for players to aim at with a cue. Resetting knocked-down skittles was slow, so they were fixed in place and holes in the table bed became the targets, with players bouncing balls off the pins to reach harder holes. The standardised form became bagatelle. Somewhere between the 1750s and 1770s, Billard japonais, also called Stosspudel, added thin metal pins and swapped the cue for a coiled spring and plunger that fired balls up a sloping playfield.
British inventor Montague Redgrave settled in the United States in 1869 and built bagatelle tables in Cincinnati. His 1871 patent for improvements in bagatelle covered the spring launcher, and his tables shrank to fit on a bar or counter, with marbles for balls and small metal pins. Historians credit his popularising of the plunger and his playfield bells as the start of modern pinball, and his bagatelle stayed in production until 1927.
Where the story really begins depends on who is asked. Steven L. Kent dates it to the 1930s mass production of Gottlieb's Baffle Ball and Raymond Maloney's Ballyhoo, Roger Sharpe points to Redgrave, and Richard M. Bueschel reaches back to tabletop garden-bowling games of the 1500s. Modern machines fire a ball through lights, bumpers and ramps, and players use flippers to rack up points before losing it, usually one ball per turn outside multi-ball phases. Bally, Gottlieb, Williams and Stern were the historic giants; Stern, Jersey Jack, American Pinball, Spooky and several others build machines today.
Source: Pinball
